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Wanderlust

A History of Walking

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Overview

Drawing together many histories-of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores-Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking. Arguing that the history of walking includes walking for pleasure as well as for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit focuses on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from philosophers to poets to mountaineers. She profiles some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction-from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton’s Nadja-finding a profound relationship between walking and thinking and walking and culture. Solnit argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in our ever more car-dependent and accelerated world.

Wanderlust

Praise

Delightful…Solnit covers all kinds of ground in her inspiring book on walking. &#8212The Seattle Times

Solnit is an elegant essayist…as a guide, she knows the path well; she is tireless and sure-footed. &#8212The New York Times

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

I. The Pace of Thoughts1. Tracing a Headland: An Introduction3. The Mind at Three Miles an Hour3. Rising and Falling: The Theorists of Bipedalism4. The Uphill Road to Grace: Some Pilgrimages5. Labyrinths and Cadillacs: Walking into the Realm of the SymbolicII. From the Garden to the Wild6. The Path Out of the Garden7. The Legs of William Wordsworth8. A Thousand Miles of Conventional Sentiment: The Literature of Walking9. Mount Obscurity and Mount Arrival10. Of Walking Clubs and Land Wars

III. Lives of the Streets11. The Solitary Stroller and the City12. Paris, or Botanizing on the Asphalt13. Citizens of the Streets: Parties, Processions, and Revolutions14. Walking After Midnight: Women, Sex, and Public Space

IV. Past the End of the Road15. Aerobic Sisyphus and the Suburbanized Psyche16. The Shape of a Walk17. Las Vegas, or the Longest Distance Between Two Points